Facebook blocked a post of mine last month for the first time since I joined it nine years ago. I was seeking to repost a blog article I had written on Janet Reno, the controversial former attorney general who died last year. I initially thought that Facebook was having technical glitches (no novelty). But I checked the page and saw the official verdict: “Could not scrape URL because it has been blocked.”

Bovard's thoughtcrime was to use a photo (viewable
here
at Texas Monthly) showing the Branch Davidian compound in
Waco in flames.

The facts are as follows: In the past week, multiple journalists — ironically, not conservatives — reported that they’d gotten locked out of projects they were working on using Google Drive, Google’s cloud storage service. Mark DiStefano of Buzzfeed UK reported the news, and later reported on Google’s “apology” for it, via Twitter. Google explained, “This morning, we made a code that incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive, which caused those documents to be automatically blocked. A fix is in place and all users should have access to their docs.”

Yes, if you store stuff at Google Drive, the Googlebots will check
it out for "abusive content". Creepy!

It looks like this is going to have to be the era of the civics
lesson, because nobody can be bothered any more to gain a basic
knowledge of how our government is supposed to work and why it was
designed that way. Not even the president of the United States. I
know this isn’t going to surprise anyone, but that’s the takeaway
from two recent interviews with Donald Trump.

In one, Trump expresses frustration that the FBI and the Justice
Department are not putting Hillary Clinton in jail already, just as
he promised during one of his debates with her
during his campaign last year. He said then that he would instruct
his attorney general to prosecute her, but he is now finding that
it’s not so simple.

Although the case is not clearcut, Schackford indicates that a large
amount of the state's problems with Dr. Konopka might be due to her
unwillingness to participate in the opioid prescription reporting
program.

President Trump has begun a 13-day trip through Asia, beginning in
Japan. His meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seems to have gone
very well. Abe presented Trump with hats saying, “Donald and
Shinzo…Make Alliance Even Greater.”

But of course, in the eyes of the liberal media, the president must
never be allowed a success of any kind. So the press invented a
“gaffe” for Trump. At one point during his visit, Trump and Abe both
fed koi, i.e., Japanese carp. Big deal. But reporters ridiculed the
president for ultimately dumping the remainder of his box of food
into a pond. CNN, in particular, went nuts on this theme. It is hard
to imagine anything more trivial, but for the press, no opportunity
to smear President Trump can be foregone.

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